National Geographic Society joins Starving Time water study

Don't drink the waterThe water from wells under Jamestown Fort often smells nasty, as Doug Rowland '12 (left) finds out in sampling sessions with William & Mary geologists Greg Hancock (center) and Jim Kaste. A study of the aquifer has led to a collaboration with university historians and funding support from the National Geographic Foundation.
Photo by Stephen Salpukas

The National Geographic Society has become involved in an
investigation of possible contaminants in the water that the original Jamestown
colonists drank in the early 17th century.

A collaboration of geologists and historians at William
& Mary are investigating the role that the water might have played during
the Starving Time. For the past couple of years, a team of William & Mary
geologists led by Jim Kaste and Greg Hancock has been sampling water from the
same wells inside the Jamestown fort used by the colonists. They’ve found that
the shallow aquifer of Jamestown Island has water that was barely drinkable at
the best of times and at the worst of times, perhaps even toxic.

The investigation is covering the first 20 years following
the 1607 founding of the Jamestown colony, which includes the dark period of
1609-1610 in which the colony almost died out—literally.

The Starving Time began with the breakdown of relations among
Powhatan Indians and the colonists following John Smith’s return to England.
The geologists hypothesize that their drinking water supply, which included water
from the river and from wells in Jamestown Fort, was mainly responsible for the
ill health that characterized the Starving Time. William & Mary historians Jim Whittenburg and Julie
Richter are probing Colonial-era death records to test the hypothesis.

A grant from National Geographic is supporting the collaboration’s
work on the historical mystery, which was named one of the ten top historical
stories of 2011 by History.com. Key to the water-toxicity hypothesis is the
seasonality of the deaths of Jamestown colonists.

“There’s evidence that things were worse in Jamestown than
they were in other settlements nearby. There was something about Jamestown that
caused very high death rates,” Kaste said. The William & Mary group believe
that “something” was something seasonally toxic about the water.

Kaste explained that the aquifer under the Jamestown fort is
vulnerable to infiltration from two sources of pollutants, the James River and
Jamestown Island’s own Pitch and Tar Swamp. Readings from a National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration buoy off Jamestown Island show that the James
River varies widely in salinity, depending on tide, rainfall and other factors.

“The water fluctuates from very fresh to quite salty,” Kaste
said. The salinity ranges from .5 parts per thousand to nearly 12 parts per
thousand. The James doesn’t get as salty as the open ocean, with salinity at
about 35 parts per thousand, but at times the river water gets too salty to
drink.

The geologists
have determined that the James River at Jamestown is at its saltiest in summer,
when salinity climbs to a level of about a third of sea water.

“If you were out on a raft and had to drink that water, you
wouldn’t last too long,” Kaste said.

As the water in river gets saltier, so does water in the
aquifer. The sandy geology of Jamestown Island means that infiltration of salt
from the James into the aquifer happens quickly: Hancock said that the wells
registered the temporary saline influx generated by the storm surge of
Hurricane Sandy.

Whittenburg notes that the Starving Time records from the
Jamestown colony show a spike in deaths that looks like it corresponds to the
seasonal spike in water salinity.

Whittenburg and Richter are poring over records of
Virginia’s Colonial era, up to around 1630. They want to see if the summer
death spike is unique to Jamestown. It’s a challenging bit of research, even
for veteran scholars associated with the NIAHD—the National Institute of
American History and Democracy, a partnership between William & Mary and
Colonial Williamsburg.

“We’ve discovered that the least likely thing to be recorded
about the deaths of these people is the month in which they died,” Whittenburg
said. Most of the records he’s examined list the deceased according to a “dead
by” date, a common practice to accommodate legal requirements.

He said as the historians go forward in their
record search, they’ll try to extrapolate from the “dead by” dates. Richter is
attempting to add context to the death records by combing texts relating to
early Jamestown for any first-hand observations of death, disease and the water
supply.